Antigua and Barbuda’s Prime Minister received United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals Award

NEW YORK – Antigua and Barbuda’s Prime Minister the Honourable Baldwin Spencer was awarded the United Nations 2008 Millennium Development Goals Achievement Award here on Thursday, September 25th, becoming the first Head of State or Government to receive this prestigious award.

“In all modesty I stand here today very much honored to have been chosen as the 2008 recipient of MDGs Achievement Award and feel very proud to contribute in the course of cooperation and development of the South,” said the Prime Minister, who received the award in recognition to his commitment and contributions to the promotion and strengthening of partnerships between the UN and the private sector to achieve the MDGs.

The MDGs represent a global partnership that has grown from the commitments and targets established at the world summits of the 1990s. Responding to the world’s main development challenges and to the calls of civil society, the MDGs promote poverty reduction, education, maternal health, gender equality, and aim at combating child mortality, AIDS and other diseases. Set for the year 2015, the MDGs are an agreed set of goals that can be achieved if all actors work together and do their part. Poor countries have pledged to govern better, and invest in their people through health care and education. Rich countries have pledged to support them, through aid, debt relief, and fairer trade.

In accepting the award from the current President of UN General Assembly His Excellency Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, Prime Minister Spencer further observed that the MDGs represent a true compact between all the nations and other stakeholders including civil society and the private sector.

PM Spencer accepting the award from UN General Assembly President H.E. Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann
“The MDGs are our hopes to spur development by improving the social and economic conditions of more than a billion people in the developing world living in extreme poverty, hunger, lack of water and shelter. It is meaningful to me that the contributions I have tried to make over the course of my career and my leadership as Chair of the Group of 77 have been seen as valuable and thus I accept this award on behalf of all the people of the South.”

Prime Minister Spencer is the third recipient of this prestigious award. He joins two distinguished recipients of this award: H.E. Sheikha Haya Rashed Al Khalifa, President of the Sixty-first Session of the United Nations General Assembly, and H.E. Srgjan Kerim, President of the Sixty-second Session of the United Nations General Assembly, both of whom were also committed to promoting the set of global anti-poverty targets.